I recently decided to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. As a liberal, I had never considered it and as a conservative, never gotten around to it.

Last night, I read an eloquent statement by Dr. Hendricks, a character in the novel who was on strike and refused to donate his services to State run medicine. It is worth pondering today. It echoes the cri de coeur of every doctor in America:

Ralph Nader’s new book may be the most important of the year. Unlike the usual beltway pundit, he grasps the essential nature of the joint outrage of liberals and conservatives at the crony capitalism that has gripped Washington under the likes of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

The English Channel is wider than the Atlantic Ocean. If Thomas Friedman can write a bestselling book saying that the world is flat, then Daniel Hannan — a member of the European Parliament — can make the case that Britain is really closer to America than it is to Europe.

In my work with President Clinton, I was always careful to take full account of polling data in helping him to formulate his policies, budget, and speeches. Some accused us of governing by polls. To some extent, they were right.

Despite inconclusive and contradictory meteorological data and the failure of predicted temperature patterns to pan out, global warming and climate change continues to be the mantra of the left, assuming theological proportions.

We all know that the United States is enmeshed in a corrupt bargain with the Saudi Monarchy: We keep a blind eye toward their human rights abuses and they continue to supply us with oil. But it takes Sarah Stern’s excellent volume to tell us just how corrupt the bargain is and how self-defeating is the relationship.

Saudi Arabia provides us one million barrels of oil each day and sends more to Europe. It uses the funds to finance jihad all over the world. 90% of fundamentalist Islamist funding comes from Saudi Arabia. It is our petro dollars that pay al Qaeda, fund extremist mosques which recruit terrorists all over the world.

Her book details it all: the Shariah Compliant Financing that wages war on Western capitalism, the “educational” grants that skew college campuses to a pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli bias, the Saudi refusal to cooperate in terrorist investigations, the Saudi success in buying off leading Americans like former President Jimmy Carter, their infiltration into our NGOs, the Saudi Islamist penetration of Europe and Canada, and their sponsorship of terrorists within our own country.

And her research could not be more well-timed. As Iran threatens Israel as she has never before been threatened and as our domestic oil production — despite Obama’s best efforts — is making our dependence on Saudi oil a thing of the past, we need to let go of this dangerous relationship and cut Saudi Arabia off. Sarah Stern explains, in explicit detail, why.

It’s President’s Day! Not just a day off, but a time to remember and celebrate the greatness of presidents like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Tell your children about them by reading them Dubs Goes to Washington And Discovers the Greatness of America. Dubs, our golden retriever, loses his tennis ball in Washington DC. To find it, he visits the Lincoln Memorial:

I took Contemporary Civilization at Columbia College. It had a reading list that was a smattering of excerpts from all the great thinkers who shaped western civilization. We referred to it as the “cocktail party course.” The readings were neither long enough nor sufficiently representative of the body of work of the author to give you a real grasp of what they were saying. But they gave you enough to get by and sound erudite.

Jim DeMint is a new kind of U.S. Senator. He puts allegiance to conservative principles ahead of partisanship and sees his role as promoting, not just a Republican majority, but a conservative majority within the GOP caucus. With Senators like Florida’s Marco Rubio, Kentucky’s Rand Paul, Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn, Utah’s Mike Lee, and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey, he defines what it means to be a conservative in the Obama era.

His new book, Now or Never: Saving America from Economic Collapse, is a manifesto for his movement, a credo for his convictions. He explains that while we all must unite in opposing Obama’s nation-destroying policies, we must also keep our eye focused on conservative answers to today’s problems. He goes deeper than mere partisanship and nay-saying and, with the assistance of his fellow Senators who contributed to the book, he articulates a real program for American revival.